Fans of Anne Rice, Marie Laveau, and French Quarter ghost tours please take note: The New Orleans Opera has a supernatural happening planned for this weekend. The company will launch its 2013-2014 season with “The Vampire,” a blood-drenched 1828 opera by German composer Heinrich Marschner.

The New Orleans production gives opera buffs a chance to experience a tuneful, Romantic work that gets little traction outside of Germany.

“You’ll walk out whistling,” said director Matthew Lata. “Marschner’s piece doesn’t get heard very often in North America, and that seems a little odd to me since it passes the fundamental test of an audience-friendly opera: It’s full of tunes you can sing in the shower.”

For Lata, it’s easy to hear Marschner’s passion for the music of Mozart – and to understand why Richard Wagner was an advocate for “The Vampire,” conducting it at least twice.

The Vampire

What: The New Orleans Opera launches its 2013-2014 season with a production that transposes Heinrich Marschner’s “The Vampire,” to contemporary New Orleans. The opera is sung in German with spoken parts in English. Projected titles are used to translate.

More: The opera encourages patrons to attend opening night in costume. There will be a post-performance party at the theater with a signature cocktail, snacks, music and a cash bar. The party runs until midnight.

But don’t expect a dutiful, historic re-creation when the curtain goes up at the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts.

Lata has transposed the action to contemporary New Orleans; translated the spoken parts into Crescent City vernacular; and asked the cast to consider both the camp possibilities and the dark psychological meanings of Marschner’s drama.

“New Orleans is America’s first city of vampires – a more likely place to find a supernatural predator than the 18th-century Scotland of Marschner’s story, “ Lata said. “Vampires aren’t a dusty, fairy tale subject around here -- even among those who don’t believe that such creatures exist.”

Of course, lots of people do believe in vampires, even if they don’t use the term.

“Vampires are one of the recurring, atavistic dreams of young children -- the monster who comes in the night to suck the life out of them -- and those dreams also resonate for adults,” Lata said. “Vampires don’t identify themselves. Vampires move among us secretly – as neighbors and acquaintances. Women are drawn to them – and destroyed. They feed on our blood. They will do anything to survive. In a sense, vampires are monsters straight from the headlines.”

Using a contemporary setting helped Lata play up the terror latent in Marschner’s tale.

“We have a scene in which the corpse of a victim is found on Bourbon Street,” the director said. “The mood swings from fun and laughter to a tragedy in which the victim’s parents – a drunk and a scold – are suddenly faced with their dead daughter on what was supposed to be the girl’s wedding day.”

Getting the New Orleans details right was part of the job for Lata, a Florida State University professor who has staged more than 100 operas at top American houses, including the flagship companies of Chicago and Washington, D.C. (Lata directed the splendid New Orleans Opera production of Verdi’s “A Masked Ball” in 2011).

“We want the audience to leave the show, look around, and realize that they’re about to walk through the set on their way home,” he said.

The big roles in “The Vampire” mostly went to out-of-town singers, including two who won kudos for their work in a recent, semi-staged version of the opera at Carnegie Hall. But Lata has about 50 New Orleans singer-actors in the production.

“Working with the Opera Chorus has been one of the most fun parts of this effort,” he said. “They act well, they sing well, and they are enthusiastic about celebrating their hometown’s peculiar charms in an opera. I put them in their milieu – say a second-line parade – and they are the ones explaining it to me. They bring their own umbrellas. They bring their own outlook. For them, a vampire story set in New Orleans was the most natural thing in the world.”